The Next Web

Web publishers, forget about Digg. Use StumbleUpon!

Written on July 2, 2008 – 12:22 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

As every ambitious web publisher does, I’m trying out some alternative ways to attract more visitors. The most important ways are still to offer great content and strive to address the information needs of readers as much as possible - yet it doesn’t hurt anyone to experiment with the possibilities digital media offers us. Of course there’s the SEO card, for which I gladly refer to Yoast, and then there’s that other popular option, social media.

The long term benefit of Digg

In the early days of this blog, Boris wrote a post about the long term benefits of Digg. Back then, we got a fair share of our visitors found us through Digg. According to Boris, this was caused by two trends:

• People use alternative ways of searching, like social media.
• Deborah Schultz reported that 61% of your visits go to posts older than a month, presumably through Google and.., social media.

We still welcome around the same amount of visitors via Digg, only the percentage is much lower now (around 1 percent of all referring links from the last thirty days). As you can tell by the screen shot below, this isn’t really impressive. Although there’s a long tail of two pages, these top 5 results give an idea of the number of referrers.

Top 5 Digg articles of the last thirty days

So apart from the frontpage mentions, Digg hasn’t be really useful. The long term benefit is quite marginal.

Well, here’s an alternative

Another service did prove to be very useful when it comes to finding new readers: StumbleUpon. Clicks from this service account for 3,2 percent of all our referring links the last thirty days (by the way, most referrers are other bloggers and Google). In a way, this makes sense, as StumbleUpon is all about discovery. When people want to search, they go to Google, when they want to find popular articles, they go to Digg, yet when people want to discover interesting content, StumbleUpon is the place to go to. Partly because of that, it has been the second most popular social media site the last thirty days (Reddit was no. 1 because we hit the frontpage). Here are the top five results:

Top 5 StumbleUpon articles of the last thirty days

Some more fun facts

• For this blog, an article on Digg brings in roughly three times more traffic than on Reddit (10000 compared to 300)
• Hacker News is the no. 3 social medium for us, these guys from Ycombinator bring in 3 percent of all visitors who came here via a referrer.
• Delicious only accounts for 0.6 percent, even though we got featured in the popular section. It seems like this service is really all about self-reference.

I hope you like that post!

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delicious, digg, hacker news, reddit, social media, stumbleupon

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Garrett Camp: “one-size-fits-all in search is history”

Written on April 4, 2008 – 2:32 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

So I hope Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbeUpon, uses Slideshare since he has just summed up all the hot topics of the web in thirty minutes. It was hard to keep track with. No kidding! All the important questions the web community struggles with, were discussed by Camp. This would have been a really interesting presentation for a less tech-savvy crowd, but most people in the audience probably didn’t hear anything new. Although it was interesting to see an overview of the emerging Web 3.0.

So after a short summary of the history of search - from directories, to algorithm, to social networks and social media - and types of search - page, query, image, visual, video, people, product and music - Camp shared some thoughts on the future:

• social search is on a roll
• collaborative annotation becomes more important: use tags!
• taming the wisdom of the crowds: expertise is more important than popularity.
• trust becomes more important than authority. You want to know the people who recommend stuff to you.
• search will adapt to the device you’re using.

Camp also described the personalization trend. “One-size-fits-all is history”, he said. Google made some first steps with Google Personalized. So the audience wants recommendations, and one way to get those is by asking input from your users - as Wikia Search does. Another way is helping your users create the best query possible by suggesting search terms and sources.

The third option is social search: what are your friends searching for? Which sites do they like? Before Camp climbed the stage we saw andUNITE, and they seem to focus on this social searching by matching your search terms with those of your friends.

The fourth way to get a personal recommendation is collaborative searching, so if you look at the example of andUNITE, the service would then compare your search terms with people you don’t know, but do have similar interests. Thus human intelligence is combined with an algorithm.

I think it’s a pity Camp didn’t talk a bit more about discovery, since that’s what his service is all about: exploring random cool sites. I’m sure he’s a visionary guy, so I hope that the next time he’ll share more of his views on discovery instead of just summing up the latest developments.

garret camp, search, stumbleupon, thenextweb2008

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Stumbling Upon Search, Garrett Camp on the Future of Search and Discovery

Written on March 25, 2008 – 9:24 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck

From an inside source we’ve heard that Garrett Camp, founder and Chief Architect of StumbleUpon, is preparing a speech on “the Future of Search and Discovery”.
This must be exciting. Think about it for a second, most of the people use the web not even close to its potential. Apart from google and their social network, people have a lot of trouble of ‘what sites to visit’ while surfing.

If you know what you’re looking for, search (Google) is the solution, but what if you don’t know what you’re looking for?
What if you want to be surprised, what if you want to know what is out there, what you can do, see, play or read on the web. The huge success of stumbleupon (compete stats) proves that discovery of new websites and content is an important aspect that is often overlooked when talking about the web. My hunch is that discovery can be at least as big as search, especially if you start in the discovery mode in can switch to search once you’ve stumbled upon a topic or website you’re interested in. (more…)

stumbleupon, thenextweb2008

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